Bruce Springsteen, ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’

“We’ll take what we can carry/And we’ll leave the rest,” Bruce Springsteen vows in his gospel-rooted “Land of Hope and Dreams,” embarking on a train journey “through fields where sunlight streams.” Sometimes his guitar strumming is the train charging ahead; sometimes it’s the quiet accompaniment to private, life-changing decisions. The song is the first release from the just-announced live album (and coming Netflix special) “Springsteen on Broadway,” and perhaps it arrives now, on the eve of a bitter election, as a reminder of immigrants’ positive aspirations. JON PARELES

Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Party for One’

The last truly effervescent pop star takes the misery of getting left behind and morphs it into fine cotton candy. “Party for One” is modest-scaled and concise. Carly Rae Jepsen isn’t a vocal powerhouse, so she finds melodies that ask only that she be persistent and bright. “Tried to let it go and say I’m over you,” she sings, then adds, with a sad purr, “I’m not oooover you.” In the video, she and several others chart their own paths of solitude in adjoining hotel rooms, until an emergency forces them all into the lobby. There, for a moment at least, they find companionship: What’s more relatable than being alone? JON CARAMANICA

Poppy featuring Grimes, ‘Play Destroy’

Mood swings, anyone? Two high-voiced, high-concept YouTube adepts — Grimes and Poppy — have collaborated on a track that intercuts between thrash guitar chords and perky synth-pop with multitracked female-vocal choruses, using interjections of “oh boy!” at transitions. “This is how we play destroy,” goes one refrain. “Manipulate the girls, indoctrinate the boys.” Insert cultural-studies dissertation here on gender roles, rock/pop stereotypes, guitars versus synthesizers, uses of irony. PARELES

LCD Soundsystem, ‘(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang’

In 1981, the English synth-pop group Heaven 17 greeted the ascent of Ronald Reagan and Britain’s far-right National Front with “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang,” warning about “Evil men with racist views/Spreading all across the land.” Reviving the song just before the midterms, LCD Soundsystem makes it bristle even more: hollowing out hollows out the midrange, cranking up a nervy ratcheting rhythm guitar, pushing synthesizer distortion into the chorus and simply exchanging “Reagan” for “the orange one” in the lyrics. PARELES

Takeoff, ‘Vacation’

In the battle of Migos solo albums, Takeoff’s “The Last Rocket” is a far more direct and clear full-length statement than Quavo’s “Quavo Huncho,” released just a couple of weeks ago. Which is surprising only in so much as Takeoff is the group’s utility player and its ballast — rarely is he allowed the full spotlight. “Vacation” is one of his album’s high points, a song with a sense of humor and modern flair, while being grounded in the committed grime of late-90s Southern rap. CARAMANICA

Vince Staples, ‘Outside!’

Few rappers bend their voices with more flexibility than Vince Staples. He achieves small moments of theater every time he stretches out or compresses a vowel, or delivers what feels like a tart lecture in just a handful of words. His new album, “FM!,” is concise and elastic, and “Outside!” is a standout, channeling the frantic urgency of late-80s Los Angeles gangster rap. CARAMANICA

Pink Sweats, ‘Cocaine’

A lovely, careful guitar-R&B ballad from Pink Sweats, a Philadelphia singer-songwriter with a spacious, soft-edged voice. The object of his affection is fickle here, but Pink Sweats is disarmingly steady, using serenade to soothe. “Cocaine” is the most taut song from his new EP, “Volume 1,” that also includes a handful of recent SoundCloud hits, including “Honesty,” in which he shows off a falsetto-esque yelp that’s as bracing as his regular croon is reassuring. CARAMANICA

Dodie, ‘If I’m Being Honest’ Live

Accepting herself and finding human connections are an unfinished, endlessly examined struggle for Dodie, a 23-year-old English songwriter with a lustrous voice she’s careful to underplay. “If I’m Being Honest” — a tune with hints of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” and Dido’s “Thank You” — analyzes the course of a flirtation, from giddy discovery to uncertain hope to realism: “You blew me up like a big balloon, way too soon.” In the live studio version, a string quartet helps cushion the letdown. PARELES

Maggie Roche, ‘Stayin’ Home’

The songs Maggie Roche (1951-2017) wrote to sing with her sisters, Suzzy and Terre, as the Roches and on her own sidestepped categories the way they evaded pop symmetries. “Lose it or abuse it/the public will refuse it,” she decided in this unreleased demo from a profound posthumous collection, “Where Do I Come From.” Her songs were acoustic but not folk music, deeply personal but not introverted, amusing but deeply barbed and too subtle for mass popularity, even as they deeply reached many listeners. “Stayin’ Home” juggles pop ambition against its obstacles — and, in one verse, some sexual harassment — and concludes with a couplet only she could conceive: “You’ve got a lot of talent but you don’t know how to use it/You ought to go into country music.” PARELES

Charles Mingus, ‘Dizzy Profile’

Mingus tended to walk his bass like it was a big, excited, possibly dangerous dog. That’s the case on this late-career live performance of “Dizzy Profile,” a rare original ballad never recorded for studio release. But he’s also straight-on, almost droll. Here he’s playing in February 1973 at Detroit’s small Strata Concert Gallery, in a quintet that includes the standout pianist Don Pullen and the tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield (recordings from these shows are being released in a five-disc set). It sounds like he’s playing up the contrast between the ballad’s classic 1950s warmth and his tougher, Vietnam-era surroundings. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

Deerhunter, ‘Death in Midsummer’

Bradford Cox, Deerhunter’s singer and songwriter, gives mortality its due in “Death in Midsummer,” advising, “In time you will see your own life fade away.” A hook played on harpsichord promises genteel, 1960s-tinged baroque-pop, but that decorum doesn’t last long. PARELES

Matt Ox featuring Valee, ‘Walk Out’

There isn’t a category of music more condescending than so-called children’s music. It presumes young people lack imagination, that they largely comprehend music as educational, that their interests are circumscribed and almost unrelentingly twee. But if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that the minds of young people are active and unexpectedly shaped, and that their desire for self-expression is limitless. And so here is 13-year-old Matt Ox, product of 10,000 SoundCloud links, delivering a new album, “OX,” that’s utterly plausible as contemporary hip-hop. Like any curious child, he has absorbed the lingo, patterns, attitude and eccentricities of his heroes. Through a quirk of internet fate last year, he rocketed from observer to participant and peer. And now he’s rapping alongside the elegantly quirky Valee, delivering high-quality simulacrum with a young-boy twist:

Get a bag! I heard you already 30And it’s so sad! ‘Cause I already made what you ain’t earnin’Started to stack, when my mama stopped giving me moneyStopped doing allowance, ‘cause that was little cash to me

This is how children can be: cocky, preposterous, sometimes a little mean. They are omnivorous, and they are inventing themselves in real time. CARAMANICA

Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, ‘The Other Side of Air I’

With her quintet, Snowy Egret, the pianist Myra Melford makes sure nothing is fixed. Time, harmonic accord, the shape of a melody — it’s all liable to melt away sooner than later. On “The Other Side of Air I,” easing into a lengthy suite, Melford’s bandmates play against and in between each other as much as in sync: Liberty Ellman’s lightly splattered guitar and Stomu Takeishi’s low, crinkling bass scuff up Melford’s starkly lit harmonies, as if to prevent her from winning the listener’s heart without them. Snowy Egret celebrates the release of “The Other Side of Air,” its second album, at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola Wednesday and Thursday. RUSSONELLO

Jon Pareles has been The Times's chief pop music critic since 1988. A musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. @JonPareles

Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the Popcast. He also writes the men's Critical Shopper column for Styles. He previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. @joncaramanica